August 25, 2008
A Crispin Glover Weekend
On Friday afternoon, I sat in the KDHX control room, playing music on my new show, minding my own business Suddenly, it dawned on me that Crispin Glover was in town, and that I had good contacts at the Webster University Film Series, which had brought him in for a three-night stand at the Wini Moore. Two phone calls and six-minutes later, I was on the phone with Crispin Glover, broadcasting the man over 42,000 watts.
It was fantastic. Though I was a nervous, stammering wreck. It was just fantastic.
Though I wasn't able to make Friday or Saturday night showings of his mixed-media performances, I was able to get to campus last night, joining maybe 60 other people. Apparently, three nights and a $20 ticket price cost a few attendees. Instead of a sold-out, single-night stand like his last visit, this time he spread his audience out over three, equally-wacky evenings.
The engaging show began with his newest slideshow, featuring readings from six of his home-made art books, including the infamous "Oak Mot." The lead piece, though, "An Egg Farm," was the most humorous, with Glover's occasionally-yelled "NO!" worth the price of admission alone. Each sub-reading had moments, moments of pure weirdness and hilarity. In what he claimed was only his third performance of the rearranged show, Glover struggled just a touch with the material, maybe due to the crowd's low energy or the newness of the slideshow. But as a live performer he is unbelievably compelling, his pure, unadulterated, freaky charisma more than making up for a few missed words.
We'll skip ahead a moment to... the third portion of the evening, in which Glover answered only about six questions, with a full-hour's worth of answers given. They were intriguing and compelling answers, sure, almost all dealing with the second portion of the show, the screening of his newest film, "It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE." By the time he finished his answers, I was ready to anoint the work as one of the great feats in modern cinema, with deceased actor/screenwriter Steven C. Stewart a latter-day Welles.
See, Crispin's a convincing speaker.
During the film, though, I was probably as surprised, perplexed and spaced-out as everyone else in the house, the greatest blend of weirdos and hipsters I'd come across in some time. (To think of all these mixed nuts in one sold-out house, instead; oh, Crispin! why did you overbook?!) From the opening moments of the film, a credit roll nodding to '30s-era "Frankenstein" films, the project was out to establish oddity.
It worked. And it would continue.
Stewart's revenge-fantasy script, which called for the cerebral palsy-affected actor to speak about a third of the film's lines in a voice nearly-impossible for most to decipher, found him wooing and killing an assortment of impossibly-beautiful women. With spoiler alert firmly noted, near the end of the work, he engages one actress in a full-on moment of sexual passion, an image intended to jar, which it did aplenty. (Glover indicated that even more of these amorous scenes were in Stewart's script, though they had to be nixed, due to a lack of actresses willing to take part in such a shoot. Understandable.)
The surreal eroticism was only one part of the film's visual pop, though. The sets were a smart combination of 1950's sitcom and graphic novel-style irony; think "I Love Lucy" meets "Sin City." The actors offered some of the most curious faces and looks you'll ever see onscreen, with veteran b-actors working alongside clear amateurs. And trying to make the connections to his first film in the "It Triology" (the truly nuts "What is it?") proved somewhat vexing throughout. Rather than a sequel, this was a completely different movie, with only some touches of continuity between the two, mostly involving the late Stewart's, er, manhood.
In fact, let's go ahead and just say it: Steven C. Stewart, even in his 60s, suffering from a collapsed lung and the lifelong case of cerebral palsy, was as endowed, willing and randy as a porn star. And Glover figured out and used those characteristics for maximum shock value in the waning minutes of the film, throwing in some cartoon-ish, over-the-top violence, to boot. He probably did stay true to Stewart's strange vision. Yeah, he probably did.
Where irony fits into any of it... we'll just have to wait for Part Three. I'll go ahead and book my ticket now.